Users of computer systems utilize different kinds of application programs ("applications") to perform various kinds of tasks. One such kind of application is a publication application, which may be utilized by users to produce professional-quality printed publications. The users of a typical application can produce publications containing rich text, graphics, extensive formatting, and footnotes.
Publication applications typically store the information relating to a publication in a file or file system object called a publication document. Because of the extensive content that publications may contain described above, publication documents often grow quite large, consuming significant quantities of storage resources and requiring a substantial amount of time and/or significant bandwidth to copy or transmit. This effect is compounded when several publication documents are stored together, e.g., when shipping sample publication documents to the user of a publication application. An effective way to reduce the size of publication documents without significantly reducing the extensiveness of that content would therefore be desirable.